December 09, 2005

Chicago Daily News II: This Time It's Digital

Chicago's got a new newspaper, if a threadbare Web site with a lofty name and set of ambitions can yet be defined as a newspaper.

Up for over a week now, the Chicago Daily News is the product of Geoff Dougherty, who, until mid-November, was an investigative and business reporter for another storied name in Chicago journalism history, The Chicago Tribune. (The Tribune, of course, hosts this blog and pays my salary.)

Dougherty, who resigned from the Tribune before the recent round of lay-offs (the paper, as is standard in personnel matters, won't comment), will probably tick off veteran Chicago hands with his cheek in using the Daily News name, but the writers and readers he's hoping to attract don't fit that description.

"We target professional Chicago residents between the ages of 22 and
45," says the site's "Advertise" page. "We offer advertisers a way to
reach young, affluent, culturally savvy
consumers in an era when newspapers, television and magazines are
struggling to connect with them."

"It feels great to be bringing that name back," says Dougherty, a
35 year old who was raised in Maryland and came to Chicago to join the
Tribune in 2001.

The Daily News was a legendary entity
in Chicago journalism, known as a "writer's paper" in part because it
was the one that came up with the bright idea of giving a column to a
locally bred reporter named Mike Royko. The Daily News was closed in March of 1978 by one portion of what was then the Field empire, also the owner at the time of the Sun-Times.

"The Chicago Daily News stopped publishing in 1978 and
the federal trademark lapsed shortly thereafter," Dougherty writes, explaining the name grab in an e-mail followup to a phone interview.

The
mission of this new thing called the Daily News, to hear Dougherty
describe it, is the usual reaction against the coverage choices (and
gaps) of the city's big papers plus the becoming-usual hope that
"citizen journalism" -- reporting and writing by amateurs -- will
create an active community and provide lots of good copy. The concept
hasn't fully proved out in many places beyond the Korean OhmyNews and, in a sense, Wikipedia, but the trend and the hopes of many on the Internet lean in that direction, at least for now.

"There's a lot to be done with investigative reporting, a lot to be done with the
Chicago Housing Authority, a lot to be done with whole swaths of Chicago that
were essentially abandoned years ago," he says. "We're non profit. We can cover those neighborhoods because they deserve to be
covered not because they're going to yield a pot of gold."

Time, one supposes, will test how that jibes with the plan to reach the young and
affluent.

Unencumbered by marriage, kids or mortgage, Dougherty hopes to hire
a staff at some point and to solicit ads beyond the nickel-and-dime
(or, increasingly, quarter-and-dollar) ads-by-Google model. He's advertising
on Craigslist for (unpaid) writers, offering the potential lure of
professional editing, and looking to give internships to eager, or even
jaded, college kids.

Here is the page with the plan, but right now it's just him and a two-person board, a journalism professor in Arizona and a video professional in Chicago. Dougherty says he was inspired by working at
the St. Petersburg Times and the close ties he says that
non-profit paper, owned by the Poynter Institute, had with its
community. He's also worked at the Miami Herald

Does it stand a chance? The editor says his costs, right now, are
all of about $10 a month in Web hosting. "The question is, Will we get
the funding to add the other features?" he asks.

The competition, beyond the bigs, would include what are essentially
community blog sites such as Chicagoist and Gapers Block, both
well-established. They publish mostly brief items that are, in fact,
quite frequently about things the Tribune and Sun-Times don't cover, although the reverse is certainly true, too.
Alternative weeklies the Reader and Newcity are in the digital space, but the newish Time Out Chicago listings and entertainment guide, while a
vibrant print product, restricts useful Web site access to subscribers.

Right now, the Daily News site is, Dougherty acknowledges, fairly
empty, with a scant handful of articles and items. What strength it has
is in the blogs: a few on local sports teams, one on offbeat world news,
and Dougherty's lively editor's blog.

"Quirky NY Mag appoints white man as editor," says the heading on
his post about the Harper's gig. Elsewhere he invites readers to "look
around. Notice that we don't have all that much content. Find some
content and send it to us. Repeat until thy fingers bleed all over thine keyboard."

The Daily News' reputation as a writer's paper goes back long before Royko -- think of Carl Sandburg, for one. The tale may be apocryphal, but I think I've heard Sandburg as a cub was the subject of a story told about a CDN reporter sent to cover the Johnstown (PA) flood. The reporter wired back a lead to the effect that "God looked down on this stricken city today....." -- and the telegraph editor promptly wired back, "Forget flood. Interview God."